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Sunday, October 26, 2014

"Wall
Street! Who shall fathom the depth and
the rottenness of thy mysteries? Has Gorgon passed through thy winding labyrinth, turning with his smile every thing
to stone – hearts as well as houses? Art
thou not the valley of riches told of by the veracious Sinbad, where millions
of diamonds lay glistening like fiery snow, but which was guarded on all sides
by poisonous serpents, whose bite was death and whose contact was pollution?"

So spoke journalist George G. Foster in
his book entitled New York in Slices, published
in New York in 1849. Which goes to show
that Wall Street – meaning not just the street itself but the whole financial
community – has from an early date inspired a mix of fascination, puzzlement,
and censure.

This post is not about the history of Wall
Street, which was dealt with in posts #95, 96, 97; it’s about greed and
addiction. Let’s continue where those
posts left off, with a look at the façade of the New York Stock Exchange, in
the heart, figuratively and literally, of Wall Street. Since 1903 the Exchange’s home has been a
noble neoclassical edifice in white marble fronted by six massive Corinthian
columns at 18 Broad Street, just south of Wall.
It suggests a Greek temple, and its pediment crammed with statuary shows
Integrity Protecting the Works of Man. An
amply robed Integrity looms centrally, with figures representing Agriculture and Mining on the
right, and Science, Industry, and Invention on the left. Who the infants near Integrity’s
feet represent, I haven’t been able to determine.
But Integrity rules over all … at least in the sculptor’s mind. A reassuring thought, is it not?

The Stock Exchange, guarded by security personnel and police with M16machine guns and police dogs, following the 9/11 attack.
Kowloonese

Integrity in the center, stretching both arms out with clenched fists. Agriculture and Mining on the right, with Agriculture shown here as a man bending under the weight of a sack of grain, and a woman in a bonnet and pioneer dress leading a sheep. Science and Industry on the left, shown here as a man pushing a lever.

The crowd outside the Exchangefollowing the 1929 Crash.

Now let’s flash back to Thursday, October
25, 1929, Black Thursday, when turmoil raged in the Stock Exchange as prices
plummeted, margin calls went out, a crowd gathered outside in the street, and
rumors of suicides circulated.That
afternoon all eyes were on Richard Whitney, acting vice-president of the New
York Stock Exchange in the absence of the Exchange’s president, who was off on
an extended honeymoon in Hawaii.A tall,
handsome, muscular man, at 1:30 p.m. Whitney walked confidently onto the trading
floor and, stopping at Post No. 2, loudly announced, “I bid 205 for 10,000
Steel!” – a bid well above the current market price. Immediately a huge cry went up from the
trading floor.Whitney then placed
similar bids for AT&T, Anaconda Copper, General Electric, and other
blue-chip stocks.Behind him were the
combined resources of the leading bankers of the day, to the tune of $130
million, on whose behalf he was acting.

After this show of confidence by Whitney,
the panic subsided and people took heart; maybe the dramatic slide was
over. Suddenly famous, Whitney looked
like a hero, the “Great White Knight” of Wall Street. In the following year the Exchange elected
him their president, and in that capacity he made speeches around the country
emphasizing the high character of the New York Stock Exchange and the companies
that were traded there. “Business
Honesty” was the name of one of his speeches, and he stressed an ethical
corporate environment as the key to recovery.
Above all, the Exchange was not to blame.

Alas, Whitney’s dramatic gesture on the
trading floor, and the speeches that followed later, were not enough. On Monday, October 28, the plunge resumed, as
the Dow dropped 13%, and on the following day, Black Tuesday, it lost another
12% in the heaviest trading ever. The
Great Crash could not be stemmed; stocks recovered, fell again, recovered a
bit, and fell once more, not reaching the bottom until 1932, by which time the
Great Depression was well under way.

(Wall Street’s history abounds in Black
Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Saturday seems to have been immune to
financial disasters, maybe because, in recent times, the New York Stock
Exchange is closed then for trading. And
the Sabbath has of course been spared.)

Who was Richard Whitney, this proponent of
financial integrity? Born in 1888 to an
old patrician family in Boston, he had attended Groton School and Harvard
College, then migrated to New York in 1910 to establish his own bond brokerage
business and purchase a seat on the prestigious New York Stock Exchange. A member of the city’s elite social clubs and
treasurer of the New York Yacht Club, he lived lavishly with his family in a
five-story red brick townhouse at 115 East 73rd Street. He also owned a 495-acre thoroughbred horse
and cattle farm in Far Hills, New Jersey, was president of the Essex Fox Hounds,
and rode elegantly to the hounds on one of his twenty horses. A quintessential Wasp, well groomed, arrogant,
and snobbish, he quietly preventing Jewish applicants from attaining
significant positions at the Exchange.
But to most observers he was the epitome of the gentleman banker.

Everything about Richard Whitney said
money; in fact, it almost screamed it.
The trouble was, he didn’t have enough of it. His life style required an income that, even
with all his connections, he simply didn’t have. He speculated, he suffered severe
losses. So finally he went into debt and
went in deep.

Flash forward to 1938, when the
comptroller of the New York Stock Exchange reported to his superiors that he
had absolute proof that Whitney, who had retired as the Exchange’s president in
1935, that Whitney’s company was insolvent and Whitney himself an embezzler. He and his company soon declared bankruptcy
and on March 10 he was indicted for embezzlement by District Attorney Thomas E.
Dewey. It soon came to light that he had
stolen money from the Stock Exchange’s Gratuity Fund, the New York Yacht Club,
and his father-in-law’s estate. The
financial elite might have forgiven him
almost anything, but stealing from the Yacht Club was unpardonable. Urbane and self-possessed, Whitney pleaded
guilty to the charges and was sentenced to 5 to 10 years at Sing Sing. Thousands showed up at Grand Central Station
to witness a former head of the Exchange being taken to prison handcuffed to
two petty racketeers. Informed of his downfall,
President Roosevelt, also a graduate of Groton and Harvard, shook his head
sadly and murmured, “Poor Groton. Poor
Harvard. Poor Dick.” (He might have added, "Poor Stock Exchange," or perhaps, "Poor Yacht Club.") Though Whitney symbolized the very interests that
the President’s New Deal was fighting, Roosevelt refused to demonize Whitney,
perhaps because they shared the same privileged background.

At first censorious, public opinion had turned
sympathetic, seeing in him a stoic martyr who even in disgrace remained a
gentleman. Respect for him extended even
to Sing Sing, where other inmates as well as guards lifted their caps to him
and asked for his autograph. Assigned at
first to mop-and-broom duty, he was soon teaching in the prison school and
playing on the baseball team. A model
prisoner, he served 3 years and 4 months of his term, was released on parole in
August 1941, and was reunited with his ever loyal wife. Banned from dealing in securities in New York
State, he became manager of a dairy farm and, later, president of a textile
company. Living quietly in Far Hills, he
died there in 1974.

Richard Whitney was neither the first nor
the last Wall Streeter to be caught cheating.
Today, the wake of the 2008 panic and resulting Great Recession, the top
executives of the biggest (“too big to fail”) U.S. banks have looked suspect to
many. Jamie Dimon, top honcho of my own
dear J.P. Morgan Chase, has been
criticized for presiding over his bank’s six-billion-dollar loss in a 2012 trade
in its London office, and its sale of risky mortgages to investors unaware of
the risks, leading to an unprecedented $13 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice
Department in 2013, with further investigations and resulting settlements
pending. Like Whitney, Mr. Dimon is a
handsome, well-tailored, clean-cut gentleman, but so far, one unsmirched by
prosecution. When questioned by the
Senate Banking Committee in 2012, he was treated deferentially like a visiting
dignitary and a financial guru oozing deep wisdom, and not like an
irresponsible operator who, so his critics assert, had endangered the whole
financial system of the country.
Immaculately groomed and urbane, though at times showing signs of
nervousness, Dimon, like Whitney long before him, seems to elicit admiration,
sympathy, and respect. (Dimon is of Greek American stock and not a WASP, which shows progress of a kind, I suppose.)

Jamie at Davos, Switzerland, in 2013, at the annual World Economic Forum. Immaculately groomed, and looking like a Ruler of the World.
World Economic Forum

What
drives these Wall Street people? The
nineteenth-century speculator Daniel Drew confessed to a friend, in a rare
moment of candor, that it wasn’t the money itself that he loved, but the wild
excitement of the game: “I must have excitement, or I should die.” But I would suggest that it’s both the money
and the excitement of the game, and that it’s a matter of addiction. I used to think that addiction involved only
substance abuse -- alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. But then a friend confessed to me that he was
addicted to sex – for me, an innocent when it comes to addiction, a novel and
enigmatic idea. To explain, he said
that, periodically, if he didn’t go out every night and have sex with another
man, he felt totally unworthy and depressed.
Hearing that, I had to accept the fact that sex too could be an
addiction. So how about money? Can greed also be, in the full and literal
sense of the word, addictive?

Relevant here is the article “For the Love
of Money” by former hedge-fund trader Sam Polk, which appeared in the Sunday New York Times of January 19, 2014. Polk tells how his dreams of being rich had
been nourished by his father, a salesman with huge dreams that never seemed to
materialize, while the family lived from paycheck to paycheck off his mother’s
salary. When, at age 22, Polk walked
onto the trading floor at Credit Suisse First Boston to begin a summer
internship, and saw an array of glowing TV screens, high-tech computer
monitors, and phone turrets, he knew at once what he wanted to do with the rest
of his life: play this video game to become rich and have power.

So began his career as a trader. Three weeks into his internship his
girlfriend dumped him: “I don’t like who you’ve become.” Devastated, he consulted a counselor who
showed him how he was using drugs and alcohol to blunt the powerlessness he had
felt as a kid; his underlying trouble, she explained, was a “spiritual
malady.”

A year or so later, having gotten off
drugs and alcohol and graduated from Columbia College, he pestered a managing
director at Bank of America until the manager took a chance and hired him. At the end of his first year he was
thrilled to receive a $40,000 bonus. But
a week later a trader only four years his senior was hired away by another
outfit for a salary of $900,000 – 22 times the size of his bonus – and he was at
once consumed by envy, and then excited by how much money was available.

So
it went. He worked hard, moved up the
Wall Street ladder, became a bond and credit default swap trader (whatever that
is). After four years in his new job
Citibank offered him $1.75 million a year.
At age 25 he reveled in money and power.
But when, at a meeting, he suggested that the new hedge-fun regulations that everyone
on Wall Street was decrying might be better for the system as a whole, the room went
quiet and his boss shot him a withering look and said emphatically that he
couldn’t think about the system as a whole, only about his company. At which point Polk began to view Wall Street
with new eyes.

Now Polk noticed how traders hurled
vitriol at the government for limiting their bonuses after the crash, and were
infuriated by any mention of higher taxes.
Having always envied the men who earned more than he did, he now began
to be embarrassed for them and himself.
Though he made more money in a single year than his mother, a nurse
practitioner, had made in her whole life, he realized that, unlike her, he
wasn’t really doing anything, wasn’t useful or necessary to society. And having foreseen the 2008 crash and made
money off of it, he himself now didn’t like who he’d become. So he decided to get out.

Polk now realized that he was an addict,
craving more money just as an alcoholic craves alcohol. And like any addict, he had an incredibly
difficult time shaking his habit. All too often he woke up in the middle of the night terrified at the thought of running
out of money, of later feeling like an idiot for giving up his one chance to be
really important. In time these feelings
abated, and he realized that he had enough money and, if he needed more, he
could earn it. But just as a recovered
alcoholic still craves alcohol, so he still at times craves money and buys a
lottery ticket.

Avarice, an engraving by the Dutch artist Jacob Matham (1571-1631).

Now Polk speaks in jails and juvenile
detention centers about getting sober, teaches a writing class for girls in the
foster system, and manages a nonprofit called Groceryships to help poor
families struggling with obesity and food addiction. Which reminds me of a recovered alcoholic I
once knew who enlisted in Alcoholics Anonymous to help other alcoholics get
free of their addiction. Yet there is no
12-step program for wealth addicts. Why
not? he asks. Because our culture
supports and even praises the addiction.
The superrich appear on the magazine covers at every newsstand, have
become our cultural gods. So we all bear
some responsibility, Polk insists, for letting wealth addicts exert so much
influence over our nation. To which I
would add the suggestion that, in a capitalist society, this is close to
inevitable. We have always adulated
wealth and those who have it.

Sam
Polk’s article – well worth reading in its entirety – provides a clear and emphatic
answer to the question posed earlier.
Can greed become an addiction? Yes!

Sunday, October 19, 2014

A superb showman, he appeared on
television before a live audience on Tuesday nights at 8:00 p.m. in full
episcopal regalia: a long purple cape over a black cassock, and on his chest a gleaming
gold cross. Of medium height and slender
build, he had graying wavy hair, deep-set, penetrating eyes with a hypnotic
gaze, and the look of an ascetic – albeit a sumptuously garbed ascetic. His rich, cultivated voice caressed,
compelled. Looking right at the camera, with
graceful arm gestures and quick changes of facial expression he spoke of good
and evil, marriage problems, prayer as a dialogue, the holy spirit, the
commandments, sin and penance, the sacraments, but in such a way as to appeal
not just to Catholics but to a nationwide audience. The set was a study with a desk, chairs, and
in the background, shelves of books, perhaps a reminder of his solid Catholic
scholarship. At times he drew simple
diagrams or wrote significant phrases on a blackboard, his only prop; if the
blackboard was full, an unseen stagehand whom he called his “angel” would erase
it, so it could receive more simple diagrams and significant phrases.

Archbishop Fulton John Sheen Spiritual Centre

The bishop’s stage presence and
sensitivity to the audience’s mood were remarkable, and he was, to use a newly
current word of the time, supremely telegenic.
Competing with comedian Milton Berle, “Mr. Television,” whose program
was on at the same time as his, the bishop’s program “Life Is Worth Living” had
an audience of some thirty million a week.
In 1952 his face appeared on the cover of Time magazine – itself a consecration – and the magazine proclaimed him “perhaps the most famous
preacher in the U.S., certainly America’s best-known Roman Catholic priest, and
the newest star of U.S. television.”

Such were the unexpected fame and success
of the Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of
New York, in the 1950s. The number of
stations carrying his program, which was filmed at the Adelphi Theater on West 54th
Street in New York, went from three to fifteen in less than two months. The demand for tickets for the show was too
overwhelming to be met, and fan mail came pouring in at the rate of 8,500
letters a week. For instance:

A Massachusetts nurse: “I looked to my minister for advice, but
because the matter was so personal I resisted asking him outright. Therefore I am writing to you….”

A South Dakota housewife: “I feel worried….”

A Philadelphia professional woman: “Last year it was made clear to me that my
husband had an affair with a married woman….
Please use some theme which you think might bear on the remorse and
regret which will follow if homes are wrecked by such relationships.”

He had a good sense of humor, used jokes and
memorable one-liners:

“I see you’ve come to have your faith
lifted.”

“An atheist is a man without visible means
of support.”

“Long time no Sheen.”

Once, imitating his friendly rival Milton
Berle, known to viewers as “Uncle Miltie,” he began, “Good evening, this is
Uncle Fultie.” And he gave credit to his
writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Though inspirational, he was fun as well.

Uncle Miltie and friends.

“Hearing nuns’ confessions,” he confessed,
“is like being stoned to death with popcorn.” “The big print giveth,” he observed, “and the
fine print taketh away.” And perhaps his
Irish American background inspired the comment, “Baloney is flattery laid on so
thick it cannot be true, and blarney is flattery so thin we love it.” Being famous and acclaimed, he probably got a
good bit of both.

Born
in 1895 to a farming family near Peoria, Illinois, he was Irish on both sides, showed
an early preference for books over farm work, and was ordained a priest in
1919. Subsequently he earned a doctorate
in philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, and claimed to
have earned another doctorate in Rome, though this has been challenged; he may
have invented it so as to speed up his advancement. Be that as it may, he had a solid foundation in Catholic philosophy
and theology before beginning his career in media with a weekly radio broadcast
in 1930. Time magazine in 1946 referred to him as “the golden-voiced
Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, U.S. Catholicism’s famed proselytizer,” but his real
career and fame began in 1952, when Sheen, lately made a bishop, began his
program “Life Is Worth Living” on television, the medium in which his splendor
of presence could at last be fully conveyed to an audience. And conveyed it was, magnificently, to
millions. Soon hailed as the first
televangelist, he was unpaid, and the commercials were kept to a minimum.

Especially memorable was a program in
February 1953 when Sheen, a fierce anti-Communist but no follower of Senator
Joe McCarthy, denounced Stalin’s regime in Russia and gave a reading of the
burial scene in Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar, substituting the names of the most prominent Soviet leaders, with
Stalin as the murdered Caesar. “Stalin
must one day meet his judgment,” he concluded.
Stalin suffered a stroke a few days later and died on March 5, 1953.

It is no surprise, then, that FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover admired Sheen and kept a file on him, since he liked to keep
track of friends as well as enemies. On
June 12, 1953, at Hoover’s invitation, the man who some thought had foretold
the death of the villainous Stalin addressed the graduation exercises of the
FBI National Academy in Washington, following which J. Edgar wrote him to say
that his address was one of the most inspirational talks he had ever
heard. And from the FBI files on the
bishop we can glean an array of interesting tidbits:

·Sheen likes ice cream and angel food cake.

·He likes to play tennis and wears a white scarf and
white flannel trousers when doing so.

·At a dinner for a group of men, when asked if he got
all he wanted for Christmas, he said no, he wanted some royal blue silk
pajamas. The next day he received twenty
pairs of the same, each of the men thinking he was acting alone.

·For years he drove a light cream-colored convertible,
wearing a camel hair coat, a white scarf, and dark glasses while driving, so as
to avoid being recognized. (His announced
appearances were always mobbed by fans.)
If stopped by a motorcycle cop for speeding, he used all his powers of
oratory to avoid a ticket.

·He lives simply in New York, rising at 6:00 a.m.,
attends a private Mass, isn’t at his desk before nine.

As these items suggest, Sheen
didn’t live the life of a saint; he dressed fashionably, lived luxuriously, and
enjoyed the attention he got in the media and the applause of adoring
crowds. Humility was not his thing.

Even so, he brought Catholicism into
mainstream television and was responsible for some remarkable conversions: author
and Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, Henry Ford II of the automobile dynasty,
violinist Fritz Kreisler and his wife, actress Virginia Mayo, and ex-Communist
turned anti-Communist Louis F. Budenz, whose conversion must have especially
delighted him.

Less elegant than Sheen, but morepowerful.

The bishop was said to be at times
difficult, if his authority was challenged.
Why his TV program ended in October 1957, when he was at the height of
his television fame, was at the time something of a mystery.It seems that he tangled with another man who
could also be difficult, if challenged: his superior, Cardinal Francis J.
Spellman of New York.(For more on
Spellman, see post #136.)In 1950 Sheen had
become director of the New York-based Society for the Propagation of the Faith,
and in 1957 he and Spellman engaged in a bitter feud.When Spellman demanded that the Society pay
his archdiocese millions for a large quantity of powdered milk that Spellman
had given the Society to distribute to the poor, Sheen flat-out refused.

When two colossal egos, one a powerful
cardinal archbishop and the other a beloved and charismatic television star,
collide, clerical sparks fly. Spellman
took the issue all the way to Pope Pius XII, a personal friend, and a private
audience resulted where he and Sheen pleaded their respective cases. To get the facts straight, the Pope phoned
President Eisenhower, who confirmed Sheen’s account that the U.S. government
had given the food to the Church free of charge. His Holiness then sided gently with Sheen, urging
reconciliation and dismissing them while giving both men his blessing. Infuriated, the Cardinal reportedly told
Sheen afterward, “I will get even with you.
It may take six months or ten years, but everyone will know what you’re
like.” Spellman quickly got Sheen’s
television program canceled and saw to it that his speaking invitations
declined and his fund-raising became more difficult. Sheen was, in effect, hounded out of the
archdiocese

That was not the end of Fulton J.
Sheen. He hosted another TV series in
the 1960s, wrote numerous books, and became Bishop of Rochester in 1966, and
when, at age 74, he resigned the position in 1969, he was made Archbishop of
the Titutular See of Newport, Wales, a ceremonial post that let him devote his
time to writing. In 1977 he underwent
surgeries that weakened him and made preaching difficult, and two years later
he died of heart disease in New York and was interred in the white marble crypt
of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, in close proximity to his nemesis, Cardinal
Spellman. Reruns of his programs are
still aired, his talks are available on DVDs, and a museum bearing his name
houses a collection of his personal items in Peoria, Illinois, where he was
first ordained and said his first Mass.
In 2002 Bishop Daniel Jenky of the Diocese of Peoria launched a campaign
for his canonization.

But that is still not the end of the
story. In 2010 the canonization campaign
was suspended, owing to a disagreement between the Archdiocese of New York,
which possesses Sheen’s remains, and the Diocese of Peoria, which wants the
remains returned to Peoria, so they can be examined and relics secured, as
required prior to beatification and canonization. In 2012 the Vatican announced that it had
recognized Sheen’s life as one of “heroic virtue,” a significant step toward
canonization; as a consequence, Sheen is now to be referred to as a “Venerable
Servant of God.” For the canonization process
to continue, two miracles are necessary, and one was soon forthcoming: a
stillborn infant who, thanks to Sheen’s prayers, is said to have lived to be
healthy.

Meanwhile the fight continues. Peoria has drawn up blueprints for an
elaborate shrine in its cathedral to house the tomb, but Cardinal Timothy Dolan
of New York refuses to part with the body, citing the wishes of Sheen’s family
and Sheen himself, who spent only a few years in Peoria and many in New York, a
city that he loved. Also, Sheen is a
personal hero for Dolan, who knew the TV programs as a young boy. He has offered Peoria some bone fragments and
other relics from the tomb, but not even a limb or two, much less the body
itself. So last September Bishop Jenky
announced “with immense sadness” that the campaign had been suspended yet
again. There is lamentation in Peoria,
but some Catholic observers applaud the delay, saying that canonization should
not be rushed, that the old fifty-year rule should be restored, allowing time
for a cult to grow organically and prove itself genuine or, in some cases, time
for it to die out. And so matters stand
to date. Meanwhile the archbishop has
been inducted into the Irish American Hall of Fame, an award now proudly
displayed in … Peoria.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who just can't let go.
Cy White

Reliquary with a thorn from Christ's crown ofthorns, in the Archbishop'sMuseum in Cologne.
Raimond Spekking

These events I have watched from afar, a
Protestant pressing his stubby nose to a window – perhaps a stained-glass
window – in amazement and disbelief at
the goings-on within. Catholicism has
always fascinated me, ever since, on my first trip to Europe long ago, I discovered
the magnificent crumbling churches, always undergoing urgent repairs, with
their marvelous statuary and windows, their flickering tapers, their venerable
tombs and, displayed in glass cases, dimly visible bits of hair or bone, and
once, on a trip to Mexico, the petrified heart of a bishop. These ancient remains, both architectural and
human, have puzzled and mystified and intrigued me: this obsessed fixation on
the physical is totally alien to Protestantism, yet essential to Catholicism
and its cult of miracles. Perhaps this fixation achieved the ultimate in the worship of the Holy Prepuce, which various churches in Europe have claimed to possess in the past, some even insisting it was a gift from Charlemagne. And if Jesus' foreskin is preserved and enshrined, why not some shorn locks (assuming he ever saw a barber) or some nail clippings? Where indeed does it end? (Incidentally, I have a number of Catholic friends quite firm in their faith, none of whom is concerned about relics.) And the very idea
of Sheen’s body being, as a compromise, divided between Peoria and New York –
poor provincial Peoria, so often derided as the quintessential small Midwestern
town, and huge, exciting, cosmopolitan New York – the very idea of it shocks
and amuses and perplexes me.

Reliquary with the tooth of Saint Apollonia,in the cathedral of Porto, Portugal.

But there is a long
history of dividing up sanctified remains. Saint Catherine of Siena’s body is enshrined
in Rome, but Siena, allegedly after a bit of smuggling abetted by a miracle, has
her head. (Legend has it that the people
of Siena tried to sneak the head out of Rome in a bag. When the Roman guards inspected the bag, they
found only rose petals, but back in Siena the head reappeared.) And Saint Francis Xavier’s body is in Goa,
India, but his right forearm is enshrined in a reliquary in Rome.

Be that as it may, in the case of the
Venerable Sheen I wish both dioceses well and hope the process of canonization
can continue, so I can go on being shocked and mystified and fascinated, and the
deceased archbishop can be properly and definitively entombed somewhere and
venerated, bringing comfort and joy to many, as his presence on television did
in life.

* * * *

Sheen was not without critics in his own
time. He was called glib and
superficial, an exponent of the “feel-good religion” of the time. “Americans like to feel good about
themselves,” a young Russian acquaintance once said to me with a mischievous smirk,
and I can’t deny the truth of his statement.
We are an irrepressibly and
incurably optimistic race, as witnessed by President Reagan’s cheery message,
“It’s morning in America.” There is a
whole industry devoted to making Americans feel good about themselves, and to
make sure they do, there’s another industry devoted to their
self-improvement. In 1923 the French
psychologist Émile Coué toured the U.S., teaching audiences to recite,
mantra-like, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” In 1936 Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People was published and soon
became a huge best seller still selling today, telling Americans that one could
change how other people behave toward you by changing how you behave toward
them. “Happiness doesn’t depend on any
external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude,” he asserted. To which he added, “Most of us have far more
courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.”
It cannot be denied that Sheen’s television program, “Life Is Worth
Living,” for all its solid foundation in Catholic thinking, partook of this
tradition. Which needn’t mean that it
was glib and superficial, though it was certainly of its time.

Also of its time and partaking of that
tradition was Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s The
Power of Positive Thinking: A Practical Guide to Mastering the Problems of
Everyday Living, published in 1952, whose introduction announced that “you
do not need to be defeated by anything, that you can have peace of mind,
improved health, and a never ceasing flow of energy.” The book stayed on the best seller list for
186 weeks, sold 5 million copies, and was translated into 15 languages.

No glamor, just a friendly smile.

Born in Ohio in 1898 and ordained a Methodist
minister in 1922, ten years later Peale switched to the Reformed Church in
America so he could become pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church at 272 Fifth
Avenue, on the corner of West 29th Street in Manhattan. (Protestants change sects as easily as they
change a hat or a suit of clothes; for Catholics it’s a bit more
complicated.) Walking down Fifth Avenue,
many a time I passed the church’s marble façade, Romanesque with a dash of
Gothic, and saw the reverend’s name emblazoned on a plaque, until one day his
name was replaced by another. That would
have been in 1984, when he ended his 52-year tenure as pastor, during which the
membership grew from 600 to over 5,000, and he became one of the city’s most
renowned preachers. He was also on radio
for 54 years and later transitioned to television.

Here are some examples of Peale’s “applied
religion”:

·Anybody can do just about anything with himself that
he really wants to and makes up his mind to do.

·Throw your heart over the fence and the rest will
follow.

·Don’t walk around with the world on your shoulders.

·Believe it is possible to solve your problem. Tremendous things happen to the
believer. So believe the answer will
come. It will.

·Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and
happy attitudes and your days will tend to be pleasant and successful.

·Practice happy thinking every day. Cultivate the merry heart, develop the
happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast.

For Peale, religion and psychology were
fused to the point that you could hardly tell one from the other. His followers lapped it up, but not everyone
was impressed. When I saw the 1964 film One Man’s Way, Hollywood’s version of
his life to date, and his name was pronounced early in the story, there were
groans throughout the theater; most of the audience had come for the other film
being shown and had no idea what – or who – this one was about.

But there were serious criticisms of his
book as well. Mental health experts
didn’t hesitate to label him a con man and a fraud. The book was full of vague references to a
“famous psychologist,” a “practicing physician,” and countless others, none of
them identified. Critics called his
understanding of the mind inaccurate, superficial, simplistic, false, and said
his reliance on self-hypnosis was potentially dangerous. For him, they asserted, such unpleasant
phenomena as murderous rage, suicidal despair, cruelty, lust, and greed don’t
really exist; they are simply trivial mental processes that will evaporate if
one’s thoughts become more cheerful. And
on a lighter note, when Adlai Stevenson, running for the presidency in 1956,
was told that Peale had endorsed the incumbent, Eisenhower, Stevenson replied,
“Speaking as a Christian, I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the Apostle
Peale appalling.”

These criticisms evidently stunned Peale,
who later said he even considered resigning his post at the Marble Collegiate
Church. What kept him there was the
realization that, whatever his critics said, he was sure he was helping
millions. On occasion he voiced a
political opinion, as when he opposed the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960,
insisting that Kennedy would serve the interests of the Catholic Church before
those of the United States. This
statement provoked condemnations by Harry Truman, the Board of Rabbis, and the leading
Protestant theologians of the day, following which Peale seems to have gone
into hiding and once again threatened to – but did not – resign from his
church. (It’s always too early to
quit.) After that he refrained from
partisan political pronouncements. But
did he ever read Dale Carnegie’s book?

When Richard Nixon was in the White House,
Peale was persona most grata there and even officiated at the wedding of Julie Nixon
and David Eisenhower. During the
Watergate crisis that forced Nixon from office, he continued to frequent the
White House, explaining that “Christ didn’t shy away from people in trouble.” One wonders if he told the besieged President
to cultivate a merry heart, or advised him that it was always too early to quit.

Presidents simply couldn’t ignore the man,
whether living or dead. In 1983
President Reagan awarded Peale the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest
civilian honor in the U.S., for his contributions to the field of theology
(which must have been news to Protestant theologians of the time). And when Peale departed this earth in 1993
(scattering sunshine, one hopes), President Bill Clinton said that Peale’s name
would always be associated “with the wondrously American values of optimism and
service.” As regards optimism, who could
argue?

The 1950s are often dismissed as dull and
conformist, when compared with the raging ’60s, but for spiritual sustenance
they offered a range of options. For
those not attuned to the splendor of Bishop Sheen’s Catholicism or the merry optimism
of Dr. Peale’s Protestantism, there was always Billy Graham.

Square-jawed, and as clean-cut as they come.

A memorable Wednesday: At 1:00 a.m. I was wakened by a loud crash in
the apartment. My flashlight revealed nothing
out of order in the bedroom, but when I looked into the middle room I saw
chaos. Four bookshelves attached to the
wall had come loose and fallen down, heaping my partner Bob’s books on my
computer, Bob’s wheelchair, and the floor.
I have never seen such devastation in the apartment. Had I been sitting at my computer, I might
well have received a concussion from the falling shelves. The books have now been removed to a bunch of
cartons, and I shall see about restoring the shelves, which I installed when we
moved in a mere 44 years ago. Bob has
vowed to get rid of many books, which is music to my ears, since there are more
shelves attached to a longer wall behind the computer, likewise installed 44
years ago. Nothing lasts forever.

Though neither of us had a full night’s
sleep, I went to the Union Square greenmarket as usual, and there encountered
the following:

·A woman whose T-shirt proclaimed, GOD BELONGS IN MY
CITY.

·Little kids four feet tall with clipboards, making
notes on what they experienced in the market.

·A bearded drummer sitting shrouded in a long plastic
bag, beating obsessively on a cardboard box and being photographed by tourists.

·An Asian couple, each with a tiny infant suspended on
their chest.

·A six foot plus young black man being towed on a
skateboard by his girlfriend.

·An Asian and a Caucasian woman, surprised to see each
other there and flashing smiles and greeting each other rapturously.

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Last week’s post was about Dorothy Norman,
the woman who knew everyone, and her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. This week’s post tells the story of her
friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India. She had long been interested in Indian art
and culture, had discussed Hinduism with the Ceylonese philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy,
had advocated independence for India, and had come to know Madame Pandit,
Nehru’s sister, who was India’s U.N. ambassador. Then, on October 11, 1949, two years after
India achieved independence, Nehru himself came to the U.S., landing at Washington
National Airport, where he and his sister, Madame Pandit, India’s U.N.
ambassador, were received by President Truman.
And when Nehru came to New York on the 15th, Dorothy Norman
and her husband were among those who welcomed him at LaGuardia Airport and were
briefly introduced; he struck her as elegant, handsome, bemused by the
reception, radiant.

Nehru, Madame Pandit, and President Truman at Washington National Airport.

At a reception at the Waldorf-Astoria that
evening Nehru, now wearing Western clothes, seemed distant, yet unofficial,
natural, and boyish. His baldness
accentuated the noble cast of his face, with its high cheekbones and sharply
sculptured nose; he had the bearing of a prince. Introduced again, she felt awkward, but her
banal remarks provoked a smile from him, then laughter. Toward the end of the reception Madame Pandit
asked her to remain after the others left, as her brother wished to speak to
her. Nehru then explained, in his
clipped British accent, that for a literary tea the following day the guest
list included only familiar names and old fogies; could she include some younger,
more progressive people? And if that was
impossible, could she invite such people to a tea at her house the day after,
when he would be available for no more than forty-five minutes, starting at
3:30 p.m.? His sister had assured him
that she knew everyone, could arrange it.
And would she please report to him at exactly 9:30 the following
morning.

This request astonished her. She had not been invited to the tea, whose
hosts – author Pearl Buck and her husband – would resent her interference. She explained the awkwardness of her
position, but Nehru and his sister reassured her: “Blame it on us. There will be no problem at all.” And since she knew Mayor O’Dwyer, could she
ask him to cut the morning ceremonies the next day to a minimum? With that, he wished her good night, bowed,
and joined the graceful, tapering fingers of both hands in an Indian
salutation.

She was baffled, perplexed, and on the
verge of laughter. But for this
handsome, princely man she was determined to do what she could. Phoning Mayor O’Dwyer at 8:30 a.m. on October
16, she got him to shorten the ceremonies.
A half hour later she phoned Pearl Buck, explained the situation,
apologized; she and her husband agreed to add a few names, then invited her to
the tea and asked her to help them take care of Nehru. She then phoned Nehru, who was grateful for
the shortened ceremonies, though he would have to endure the traditional
ticker-tape parade on Lower Broadway.
Resigning himself to the tea, he repeated his request that she entertain
him on the following afternoon. Who
should she invite, and how many? “I
leave everything to you.”

She and her husband were invited to most
of the welcoming events of the day, but she managed to make out a list of
guests for her reception and telegrammed invitations. Never before had she been asked to arrange
and preside over a gathering if such significance, and on such short notice,
but arrange it she did. The following
afternoon the Norman living room on East 70th Street was crowded
with writers, editors, publishers, intellectuals, and some of Nehru’s family
and entourage. Nehru made no speech but
answered questions. Cameras clicked,
questions followed, and his answers often, to everyone’s surprise, provoked
laughter. He stayed not forty-five
minutes but an hour and a half, seemed relaxed and happy. When they saw him down to his limousine, he
invited her to accompany him to Boston the next day. It would be her first flight and the thought
of it terrified her, but she agreed.

She went on the plane with Madame Pandit
and Nehru’s only daughter, Indira Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma), a shy
young woman burdened by her role as the prime minister’s daughter. Nehru had Norman sit next to him and they
discussed Hinduism and Buddhism. In
Boston, more ceremonies, more visits. Together
they visited Boston’s two Indian spiritual centers, following which he said to
her, “You should be glad, Dorothy, that we don’t have three spiritual centers in Boston.”
Back in New York, he gave her a book of his, The Unity of India, drew her attention to a passage describing the
beauty of Kashmir as resembling a supremely beautiful woman; their eyes met,
and when his revealed a tenderness she hadn’t seen before, she burst into
tears. Soon afterward, with his official
visit to the city at an end, he left; she joined others at the airport to see
him off.

Sukarno, a professed admirer of the U.S.

That was hardly the end of the
friendship. Nehru invited her to India
for the January 1950 celebrations of the founding of the republic. With her children grown and her journal Twice a Year at an end, she was able to
take a leave of absence from the New York
Post and go. Arriving at Bombay
airport, she was shocked by the two-thin dark bodies on the roads, and the
contrast between street beggars and prosperous Indians in their fine cars. In New Delhi she stayed in the Prime
Minister’s residence, attended by servants in sashes and turbans, and had breakfast
and dinner daily with Nehru and his family.
Ceremonies, vast crowds, pageantry.
At a formal dinner she chatted with Nehru and President Sukarno of
Indonesia, who told her of being raised on Whitman and Lincoln and announced
with a superior air that, unlike the British-educated Nehru and other Indian
leaders, he had been nurtured by the democratic American tradition. On one occasion Nehru, following behind his
household, suddenly stopped and stood on his head. Those ahead of him didn't see it, but he cast
an amused look at her to see if she had noticed. She had, their eyes met, and she forced
herself not to laugh, while he walked on as if nothing had happened. Throughout her stay she accompanied Nehru on
visits, talked with him, got to know his shy daughter Indira better. At times he looked at Norman with the eyes of
a child; at times he seemed burdened, trapped in a cage, distant; at times he
was relaxed, his charm devastating.

After a visit of three and a half months,
she returned to New York, determined to lobby the government to send food to
starving India. The amazing beauty of
India, as well as its poverty, haunted her, but what haunted her most was the
face of Nehru, its every feature and nuance.
Yet when her husband greeted her at the airport, she was overjoyed. For all the wonder of India, she knew that
he, her children, and New York were her reality; she still hoped their marriage
would survive.

It didn’t.
Edward became dictatorial, stern, forbidding, harsh with the children
and her. His outbursts multiplied, followed
by depression; she came to fear sudden violence on his part. Then, with the children grown, she urged him
to find a more compatible woman and marry her; he tried, seemed to find one,
but it didn’t work out. Though he
pleaded with her not to, in 1953 she went to Reno and initiated divorce
proceedings. After six weeks in Reno she
obtained the divorce; both were heartsick.

And of course the inevitable
question: Were she and Nehru
lovers? The memoir certainly indicates a
mutual attraction on their part, and the headstand antic, done expressly for
her amusement, implies complicity. But to
my knowledge she never acknowledged such an affair, and his life was so in
view, with his relatives close at hand, and so relentlessly scheduled, that it
is hard to imagine. Nehru, whose wife
died in 1936, evidently had a protracted affair with Lady Mountbatten, the
attractive wife of the last Viceroy of India.
A photo of the Viceroy, his wife, and Nehru shows Lord Mountbatten,
splendidly garbed in an immaculate white naval uniform, looking serious and
official, while Nehru and Lady Mountbatten are convulsed with laughter over
something that the Viceroy is unaware of or chooses to ignore. Certainly there was a bond between the Prime
Minister and the Vicereine, embarrassing as it is today for the Indian
government, so eager to preserve Nehru’s legendary status that it canceled a
film being made in Delhi that would have told the story of the illustrious
triangle. When Edwina Mountbatten died
in 1960 and her body was given a sea burial off the coast of England, Nehru
sent an Indian Navy frigate to cast a wreath into the waters on his behalf. So if her face didn’t launch a thousand ships
like Helen of Troy, she at least launched one.

Lord and Lady Mountbatten with you-know-who. In his presence they were both on their best behavior.

But if Nehru and Dorothy Norman ever
trysted and kept it secret, it was a miracle of amorous discretion. So perhaps their relationship was simply
friendship. She had no official
position, didn’t represent her country, didn’t criticize him for his nonaligned
position in the Cold War, so in her presence he could be candid and relaxed, and even, as
in the headstand stunt, a mischievous boy showing off for his girl. But his influence on her was deep, and in time
she edited a collection of his writings, Nehru,
the First Sixty Years, that was published in two volumes in 1965.

Dorothy Norman went on to more
“encounters” – the artists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, the
Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and
his wife, others – and turned away from politics and social welfare concerns to
develop a keen interest in myth and symbolism.
Her memoir ends with a moving account of her mother telling her at last,
and fervently, how much she loved her, and then dying in her arms.

Norman does not chronicle her later years,
and the memoir, with a single exception, offers only photographs of her in her
youth, several of them by Stieglitz. And
afterward? She wrote, she edited, she
gave her collection of Stieglitz photographs to the Philadelphia Museum of
Art. As for her personal life, I know
only what the in-house editor at Harcourt told me, how in her later years she
surrounded herself with a circle of friends, all male homosexuals, among them
the Japanese American artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi. (I have found no evidence online that Noguchi
was gay, though his father was.) Once
her youthful looks had faded, was this Norman’s refuge, among men who could
offer, not romance or sex, but friendship?
Even as she worked on her memoir, she told the editor it could never be
published while Georgia O’Keeffe was alive.
O’Keeffe died in 1986; the memoir was published in 1987 with a
dedication “To Edward, my first love.”
Dorothy Norman died in 1997 at age 92.

What is one to make of this woman who knew
everyone? Limousine liberal, do-gooder,
dilettante – she can be stuck with all these labels, but I think it would be
unfair. She served the great –
Stieglitz, Nehru, others -- without
herself attaining greatness. She never
worked a day in her life, in the sense of a salary-paying job, but she was
constantly busy, never idle. A doer, she made things happen. What was it that let her bond so easily with
others? Her beauty, her charm, her
intelligence. And from that bonding came
results: books, articles, exhibitions, food for a starving India, her biography
of Stieglitz, her collection of Nehru’s writings, the Alfred Stieglitz Center
in Philadelphia. And if her later turn
toward myth and symbolism gets a bit vaporous and “New Agey,” that is probably
the case with most Western followers of the great traditions, which for deep
understanding require a focused lifelong commitment that few of us can offer.

Time and again Dorothy Norman was in just
the right place at just the right time.
When her friend the renowned photographer Edward Steichen was putting
together a photographic exhibition, The
Family of Man, to be presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 -- an
exhibition that would show the oneness of human hopes, fears, and
preoccupations among all races, nations, and cultures throughout the world, and
that would be the culmination of his career -- he found that the photos by
themselves seemed lifeless, they needed captions; in desperation he appealed to
her. Seeing a print of the first photo,
showing a reflection of light on earth and water, she at once proposed a line from
the opening of Genesis, “And God said, Let there be light.” Seeing another print of lovers in an intimate
embrace, she suggested the closing lines of Joyce’s Ulysses, with Molly Bloom’s rapturous “Yes!” For other photos she drew on the Bible, Greek
tragedy, Saint-John Perse, the Bhagavad Gita, other sources. When the exhibition opened, it was a great
success, following which it toured the world for eight years and was seen by
over nine million people. Decidedly, the
right person in the right place at the right time. Her memoir too, evoking timeless myths, ends
with an inspiring “Yes.”

Front page of the exhibition catalog.Dinales

Source note: The sources for this post are the same as
those mentioned in the previous post: the 1977 interview and Norman’s Encounters: A Memoir (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1987).

Are the Yahoos coming? I do not mean this blog to be political, but
occasionally I feel compelled to voice an opinion. A New
York Times article of September 29 reported that, among the Republican
nominees likely to be elected to the House of Representatives in November, are
some who have made these statements:

·Single parenthood should be reclassified as child
abuse.

·Four “blood moons” will herald world-changing events.

·Islam is not a religion but a “complete geopolitical
structure” unworthy of tax exemption.

·Hillary Clinton is the Antichrist.

·Equal-pay legislation should be opposed, because money
is more important to men than to women.

·Evolution is a lie from the pit of hell.

No further comment is
necessary.

Coming soon: The bishop whose splendor of presence almost
eclipsed comedian Milton Berle, who was known as Mr. Television. And to round things out, I’ll toss in merry
optimism and the Power of Positive Thinking.
Also: Peoria vs. New York or, Who
will get the archiepiscopal remains?

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